answering my own question, it seems the answer is yes. The library I am using provides a getDepth() method which seems to work for my purposes.
Still, I do not see any way to access the nodes of the path, so it's unclear if the path is formatted according to bip32, 44, or something else.
Example, from a mycelium android xpub alone I can determine that the path is like:
m/?/?/xpub
But what I want to be certain of is:
m/44/0/xpub ( bip 44 )
- or -
m/0/0/xpub ( bip 32, in the wrong place )
If I'm not mistaken, the only way to obtain that info is out of band. Eg, by asking the user "What wallet software did you export this key from?" And then I need to maintain a matrix of wallet software versions and their idiosyncracies so I can know which bip/purpose they use for exporting keys. fun!
Hopefully someone can inform me I'm wrong about that? Or is there some heuristic that can be used to determine whether bip32 or bip44 is used?
ok, so to my question: Given only an xpub and no additional info about where it came from, is it possible to determine what location it should be at in the path? Basically my code needs to be 100% certain that it is generating the correct addresses, and also that it can find both receive and change addresses.